


And even so our dreams

by Quillori



Category: Mysterious Mr. Quin - Agatha Christie
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 04:18:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13138920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/pseuds/Quillori
Summary: Shortly beforeHarelquin's Lane, Mr Satterthwaite spends an idle hour daydreaming in an antique shop.





	And even so our dreams

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wasuremono](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wasuremono/gifts).



It was a wet November afternoon. Even the ubiquitous London pigeon had taken cover, tucked away on window ledges and under eaves. Mr Satterthwaite had likewise taken cover, though rather more successfully than the pigeons, being comfortably ensconced in a small antique shop. He was a short, dried-up old man, with bright, inquisitive eyes, who put even his friends (and he had many) in mind of a bird, though perhaps more a curious little sparrow than a fat and quarrelsome pigeon. 

He had intended to visit a particular art gallery, not one of the better known establishments, but one whose owner had a good eye for promising new talent; finding it unexpectedly closed, and the rain beginning to fall hard, he had instead entered the nearby door of Coleman & Coleman Ltd. It was not somewhere he had visited before: a collector, but a collector above all of people, he preferred paintings to the detritus of long forgotten lives. To the extent that it was beautiful, or skilfully made, he would admire an antique, but it could not have the same fascination for him as an artwork that revealed the world, not as it was to him, but as it appeared to the painter. Still, he knew something about antiques, since he had so many of the sort of friends whose houses were casually full of them (for it must be said that Mr Satterthwaite, though interested in all humanity, had like any other collector specific areas of interests, and in his case it was the titled, the socially important, the old landed gentry).

The two Colemans, or perhaps their successors, had stocked the place with an appealing mixture of the genuinely fine and the second-rate but intriguing, with just enough plain junk to make the first two categories seem like hidden treasure, and he spent a happy half hour pottering around. He admired a rather fine foot stool, and he also admired the artful way a somewhat questionable small cabinet had been covered in dust and placed almost, but not quite, out of sight, where the pleasure of finding it might give it a plausibilty it would have lacked if clean and well-lit.

Towards the back of the shop he found a rickety table of no particular value, on which was an old toy theatre, with scene changes and cut-out actors piled next to it. It was the sort that had originally been sold plain, and some long-ago child had carefully coloured in the actors, giving them gaily coloured robes and surprisingly realistic faces. Here was a card and painted paper Beauty, lying peacefully beside a fearsome Beast, here were a pair of Cinderellas, one smudged with ashes, one in golden robes, here were a set of handsome princes, coloured but not cut out, four of them to a page, each in a different attitude: struck with despair, ardently wooing, dancing, duelling an unseen opponent…

Had they been modelled from life? Mr Satterthwaite thought they must have been - the detail of the expression was too convincing to be imaginary, or copied from some then-famous actor, seen once on a distant stage. No, the same few faces recurred in many roles, and always with the little tics and habits of real people: the pretty girl scrunched up her nose a little, not unattractively, when she was happy, and bit her lip slightly when she was worried or sad, no matter whether she was dressed as a princess, or a fairy, or a serving girl. The prince had a terrible louring frown, and even when happy his piercing blue eyes gazed out from under heavy brows. And who was this old man, his hair styled in a fashion that must have been outdated even then? The father, perhaps, a kindly gleam in his eye even though his role must have been to thwart the young lovers, or to urge his young daughter into the arms of some wealthy but undesirable old miser.

There were a profusion, too, of backdrops: the outside of a villa, surrounded by luxuriant plants in every shade of green, a grand drawing room, a desolate wilderness. And yet something seemed to be missing. What could it be? The lovers, the obstacle to their union, a limited caste of friends and servants, one or two antagonists, a few colourful bit players to match the more extravagant scenery. No, surely it was his imagination: nothing at all was lacking.

There was a quiet cough behind him, and for a moment, before he looked round, he almost expected a slim, dark figure. But it was only the proprietor, plump and well into middle age, with an incongruous mustache which didn’t suit him. 

“This isn’t quite in your normal line?” suggested Mr Satterthwaite, still haunted by a subtle sense there was something not quite right about the theatre.

“Not at all, no. We’ve never dealt with children’s toys. You would be better of with Peterson's, if that’s where your interest lies. But I wanted to see it went to a good home.”

Mr Satterthwaite put on his most confidable face, a mixture of bland acceptance and quiet attentiveness that had encouraged far more discreet men than Mr Coleman to part with far more scandalous secrets.

“It isn’t really part of my stock, not as such. I inherited it. It used to belong to my grandfather when he was a little boy. He was the one who coloured it - I’ve always thought he would have had a future as a portraitist, but of course he went into business. He and his brother were the original Colemans. I’d have liked to have kept it: I played with it myself as a child, but my wife doesn’t like clutter and it seems a shame somehow to keep it all folded away forever. I suppose, being a theatre, it needs an audience.”

He looked a little embarrassed at admitting to such whimsy, but Mr Satterthwaite merely looked understanding, and he found himself encouraged to talk about it further. He was in a way a lonely man - it is true he talked at length with many clients, about furniture styles, and varnish, and upholstery, and he talked at home with his wife about domestic matters, but his wife was a practical woman who cared about the here-and-now, while his clients were naturally interested in what he had to sell and not in what he thought, and being both hard-working and uxurious, he had never found the time to make close friends of his own. But Mr Satterthwaite was a wonderfully attentive and sympathetic listener.

“I remember my grandfather telling me about the plays he put on as a boy. Half the time he’d be talking about the play, and half about his own family, whose likenesses he’d given the actors. Then I’d take the whole lot, truth and fiction alike, and invent my own plays from it, imagining that perhaps they’d really happened, once upon a time. I don’t think I could tell you now which parts he told me and which I made up, and of the parts he told which he said were true and which his own stories. It’s a shame. Looking back, I wish I knew the truth of things.” 

“But perhaps," suggested Mr Satterthwaite diffidently, “perhaps you could now. So much time has passed, it’s bound to give you a better perspective.”

The current Coleman looked at him with surprise. “I’d never thought of it that way. But you may be right. Like forgeries - it doesn’t matter how convincing they are to start with, give it long enough and you can always spot them. Whatever identifying features people looked for at the time, and the fraud copied convincingly, times and fashions change, and we look for something else, and don’t find it. Yes, there’s something in that.”

“I remember one story. It was a fairytale, Beauty and the Beast. Look, there is the Beast on top of the pile. It has a remarkably human face, doesn’t it? Beauty must be here somewhere too … yes, here she is. That was his older sister, Dorothea. I always thought she must have had a beautiful smile. And here is her handsome prince, after the enchantment ends. Robert, his name was, and they got their happily-ever-after, or at any rate they were married. She died young.”

As the man spoke, Mr Satterthwaite looked at the little theatre, imagining the stories unfolding: in his mind’s eye he could see it as a true stage, and he in his accustomed seat, watching. 

There was a house in a great wood (the wood was layers of painted trees, with woodland deer pulled by cord across the stage between them). There was an old man sitting by the door, mending shoes. (Who would come all the way into the forest to have shoes mended? Better not to ask such questions of a fairy tale.) There was a young girl, patiently sewing a hem. She might have been pretty, had she smiled, but just then she had a distant, slightly discontented look about her, as one who waits for something, or someone, and has been waiting a long time.

Through the open door, you could just see two young boys, twins perhaps, playing together on the floor. 

“I must hurry to finish these shoes,” said the old man. “They’ll be wanting them at the palace for the ball. They say the prince is such a fine dancer he can wear out twelve pairs of shoes in an evening.”

“I don’t think it’s the way he dances,” said the girl. “It’s the ridiculous stuff they insist on using for the shoes. If you were allowed to put proper soles on them, they’d last forever.”

The old man laughed, and said fashion was good for business - what work would there be for a cobbler if things could be relied upon to last? While he was speaking, a wood-cutter came up to the side of the house, where the girl could see him but her father couldn’t. He was a handsome man, with heavy eyebrows and bright blue eyes. He had with him two birds he’d caught in a net, turtle-doves, which he indicated to the girl he’d brought her as a gift. She cast her eyes demurely down and ignored him, but the boys inside the house caught sight of him, and came running out, crying “Hob! It’s out Hobkins! What have you brought us?”. They were like little acrobats, tumbling and leaping over each other, and the girl, in their haste to get outside. Seeing them so playful and happy, the girl smiled, quite suddenly and completely, and Satterthwaite had been right (he was always right about such things): it was exactly what was needed to make her pretty. 

The scene changed, as though it had been tapped with a magic wand: the trees transformed themselves to columns, the forest floor became marble. They were in a palace. Two courtiers stood in a corner. “It is only an appearance,” said one. 

“Naturally,” said the other. “He is the prince, and therefore his character is perfect. But it is an unfortunate appearance. So long as he seems so wild and uncouth, so lacking in courtesy, no lady will entrust him with her heart.”

In another corner, unnoticed, there was a servant girl cleaning the floor. She was very nearly pretty, and she was singing quietly to herself as she worked, a pleasant, popular song that seemed unwontedly sad on her lips: oh whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad. Another version of her was waiting in the wings, dressed in glowing gold, ready to take the stage for the grand ball scene, but as a servant girl she was emulating Catskin from the fairy tale, with a ragged coat of fur - to Mr Satterthwaite’s discerning eye, it appeared to be mostly sealskin.

He was just arranging in his imagination another scene, this time in a little cottage, with a young wife sitting by the fire, and two children playing at her feet, a desolate, wave-beaten shore visible through the stage window, when the shop door bell brought him guiltily back to the present. The modern Mr Coleman bustled off to praise a rather damaged Hepplewhite chair to the new customer, leaving Mr Satterthwaite to contemplate the toy theatre. It was a strange thing, he reflected, and not nearly as similar to the real thing as you might expect, for at the theatre the audience and the actors were quite separate, whereas often with the toy the only audience might at the same time, behind the scenes, be the one who moved the actors and made them speak their lines. 

But something was definitely not right. He knew the way the story should go: the father who tries in vain to separate the lovers, the patient girl who sees past the apparent beast to the prince within, the happy ending. But it hadn’t gone like that, had it? Her father hadn’t objected. There had been no obstacles to overcome. And she hadn’t smiled when she saw her lover, but only afterwards at something else. And yet there were no other players. 

He sorted through them all again, but every possible man had the same face. Who then was she waiting for, who took so long to come? Was she waiting for anyone at all, or only for her freedom? Perhaps the prince had really been a beast? Somehow, that didn’t seem to be quite right either. He was used by now to the feel of the unquiet dead, those who’d gone protesting and too soon, still longing for something from life, and there was nothing of that here. If there was a mystery for him, it was something else: there was no vengeance to be sought, no wrong to be righted.

He had almost given up, turning to walk away, when he saw a single sheet of paper had fallen from the table and lay half in the shadow underneath a silk screen. It was the one figure in four poses, this time not only uncut but uncoloured, and not from any theatrical fairy tale, but from its traditional sequel, the harlequinade. It was only a piece of old paper, and there was no reason at all for it to make his heart beat a little faster, or for the years to suddenly lie lighter upon him, or for him to murmur to himself “Yes, I see, of course that would be what she wanted.”. No reason either that Mr Coleman, having disposed of chair and customer alike, should discover he had sold the theatre too, and for no more effort on his part than a few reminiscences.


End file.
